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Tsukishima never was that good with scents. His nose did its job, but it did so at a minimal, detailless effort.
That's why he could never figure out what it was that her hair smelled like. Sea salt stuck to it, as it did to everything else on the island, but there was something else underneath. Maybe it was flowers that she had picked near her house and added to her hair, or it might have been tea. She knew how to do that sort of thing — had explained it to him once, but the art of shampoo-making was lost on his boyish mind.
The sergeant stared at the strands in his hand. He couldn't really smell anything from them. Did hair lose its scent once removed from its owner, did it wilt like a flower pulled from its green habitat?
If it did, it didn't feel like it though; a sort of softness touched his thumbs when he ran them over it.
Her hair wasn't very soft. It shone in the sun, she washed it thoroughly enough for that. But she wouldn't brush it much. According to her it would only invite the curls to being an even more ferocious beast on her head (she did have that dramatic way with words, sometimes). It would puff up to a cloud, and it would no longer be Igogusa.
He brought the strands to his nose one more time, brows furrowed in unused concentration. It still smelled like nothing — no, it smelled like the absence of anything. Like it had been cleaned with clinical precision. Hajime shouldn't have been surprised, and he wasn't.
What did all this matter anyway, whether it was truly her hair or a piece of the sea? What did reality matter anyway?
He let the tied strands drop into the dark water with little ceremony, quickly losing them in the swirling reflection of the night sky. For a moment he wondered if real hair should float or not, before pushing aside the thought, and turning to join the First Lieutenant.
Since when did weapons wonder how they were made in the factory?